Why US Energy and Economic Prospects Improve if Obama Loses

US President Obama has big plans for using the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to shut down a large number of US energy projects and enterprises. The EPA's destructive plans are already in the works, and will be enacted over the next few months even if Obama is defeated. Fortunately, a new Romney / Ryan administration would soon be on the job to shut down those shenanigans.

With a new US administration will come a new and brighter day for US energy -- with healthy add-on effects to the US economy at large. Here is a look at the big advantage that the US will have over Europe and East Asia -- if Obama is defeated:

Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethylene and fertilizer plants alone.

A study by the American Chemistry Council said the shale gas bonanza has reversed the fortunes of the chemical, plastics, aluminium, iron and steel, rubber, coated metals, and glass industries. "This was virtually unthinkable five years ago," said the body’s president, Cal Dooley.

...The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America’s energy rebound, though a very big one. As many readers will have seen, the US energy department said last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia.

...America looks poised to become the world’s biggest producer in 2014. It will approach the Holy Grail of "energy independence" before the end of the decade. This is largely due to hydraulic fracturing - blasting rock with water jets - to extract shale gas and oil, though solar power and onshore wind are playing their part.

Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting towards energy suicide. So is Japan as it shuts down its nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster. China is more hard-headed, as it needs to be. The country is adding 20m cars a year. Chinese oil imports are rising by an extra 0.5m b/d annually.

As of last week, US natural gas prices were roughly one third of European levels. The German chemicals group BASF said it had become impossible to match the US on production costs.

Asia is facing an even greater handicap as Japan soaks up supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to offset the closure of its nuclear power stations. Prices on the Pacific rim are near $15 per million British thermal units (BTU), compared to $3 in the US. _Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

If Obama is re-elected, all of those positive plans could easily come screeching to a halt, as the EPA moves to regulate the shale bonanza out of existence -- as well as a large number of other energy enterprises.

The green movement is composed largely of very impractical ideologues. They have achieved ascendancy in several governments of advanced nations -- including the US, Germany, Australia, and several others -- to a greater or lesser extent. Greens reject reliable forms of energy such as nuclear and hydrocarbons, in favour of the intermittent unreliables -- big wind and big solar.

If Europe does not find a way out of the green miasma of the energy starvationist lefty-Luddite greens, it will find itself growing demographically old in an environment of increasing energy scarcity. It is bad enough to grow old. But to grow old in the dark and cold -- that is a sad legacy for a once great continent.

Obama has time and time again tried to champion Clean Energy Sources. Public access to real facts is being whitewashed by this rhetoric while conservative hands paint the Blackface on our President. Watch them mix and apply the paints to his face in a portrait of Obama being Bamboozed by the Far Right at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/10/bamboozling-obama.html

bmz on November 02 2012 said:

Ever since Nixon, Republicans have been promising that if we just give the oil industry enough tax breaks we will become energy independent. Subsequently oil production has fallen under every Republican president. Only under socialist, energy hating Obama have we actually increased oil production. Republicans always talk-the-talk; but when given the opportunity to walk-the-walk, they just follow the money, like they always do. In 2010 and 2011, the Democrats proposed bills which would make us energy independent by using our natural gas abundance as a transportation fuel. The Republicans filibustered both bills.